Its a while since I posted here :)
I've just rented a dedicated server from OVH - it came with their Gentoo 2012 offering, which is interesting in itself by not relevant to my problem, since its not there any more.

I've set up kernel raid1 for /boot, swap and LVM2 and installed 3.7.0-hardened, several times now.
Each time, I fail to get any /dev/sd* entries in the initrd /dev ... so thats game over.

Making the nodes with mknod doesn't help - there is nothing underneath the nodes to mount or to feed to mdadm.

Hello NeddySeagoon, welcome to the Gentoo forums. I'm glad you could resolve the issue yourself. Please add [SOLVED] to the title of your post, so others don't have to read the whole lot, just to find out it's resolved. Thank you!

Could I ask you more info regarding your issue? Was that since you include some options for KVM into the kernel config, make the system being "Misleaded" for different hardware, hence failing to boot the machine?

I have recently make a new install of Gentoo, suppose the steps that I took was all correct (I guess I pretty familiar with the steps as I have done this many times), but the system boot up in a very weird shape. saying my harddisk as read only, and the stty login saying the hostname as (none). The whole thing just very weird, but I sure I have done the following things correctly,

1) Correctly setup the AHCI driver, hence it does able to boot
2) Correct config in /etc/fstab
3) Correct config in bootloader lilo

But the system just looks very weird when it boots up. So when I see your post, I wonder if this is due to the KVM that you just mentioned? one more thing different with my past installation is, this time the kernel takes much longer than the past, I was wondering if the newer version of kernel has implemented any features hence it has to wait for several seconds (like 10 seconds).....

NeddySeagoon wrote:

Team,
-- Edit --

It is the kernel. The Virtual KVM provided for debugging provides entirely different hardware to the real hardware. The penny just dropped. Ouch!

OVH have some very wierd debug. They rent you an Intel based system, which is very good value for money.
For debug they provide a Virtual Keyboard Video Mouse (vKVM) system. This system runs your nice shiny lean -march=native install in a QEMU virtual machine that pretends to have an AMD processor and hardware that is nothing like the real hardware.

So the debug goes like this. Boot on the real hardware and nothing happens, you only know its broken, as you don't get any boot messages.
Switch over the vKVM and you can hear the crash as QEMU with an AMD CPU can't execute Intel optimised code and when you fix that, you realise it can't mount root because the emulated HDD controller is not in your kernel.

So you fix your kernel to be generic and all the packages needed to boot and add in support for the QEMU vKVM environment.

I was lucky. I use LVM2 on top of Raid1 on my OVH server, so I have to have an initrd. For debug, it was enough to build the kernel and initrd components as -mtune=generic._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.